Money is art in Paris – World

World – Since ancient times, money has fueled the imagination of artists, and in particular the most precious metal – gold – has always been present in ancient myths and art and has come intact, precious, significant to the present day our. This is the central theme of the original exhibition money in art presented in the spaces of the Money of Paris until 24 September 2023.

From the origins of the myth, passing through money trafficking and moral and religious themes up to the invention of the art market, the representations of money in art have multiplied over the centuries. If in religious and biblical paintings there is no lack of examples in the history of art that illustrate the “transactional” episodes of the use of money in history (some of the most famous anecdotes are an example such as the gifts of the Magi, the gold of Caesar , Judas’ 30 denarii …), and the themes of avarice, charity, the “good and bad rich” and moral injunctions (vanity, the memento mori) appear in the countries converted to the Protestant Reformation, starting from the sixteenth century, the representations of monetary transactions, of commerce are often one of the themes most often taken as inspiration to narrate the history of men. With the birth of Impressionism in France in the 19th century, a historical passage also emerges and new emerging modes of expression meet with an emerging art trade where money is one of the protagonists which underlines – alongside the break between aesthetics and the world of the Academy – and questions the links between the value of work, that of use and of exchange which will be the prodromes in the fast century which will follow a new and even more revolutionary change of point of view. In the twentieth century, the artist is no longer satisfied with representing the themes linked to money in the traditional form but initiates a reflection on his mechanisms, which increasingly become part of the creative process itself.

Two radical attitudes oppose each other, on the one hand the valorisation of the artist’s gesture, independently of the material reality of the art object, on the other, the provocative claim of art as a way to make money.

“This exhibition is a wonderful illustration of the cultural programming that the Monnaie de Paris institution intends to carry forward – he explained Marc Schwartz, President and CEO of the French equivalent of the state mint – money and currency are not just instruments of economic exchange, they carry meaning and are part of the social space. And this is what we want to show in the Moneta halls: the way in which artists deal with the theme of money and its representations in society.

In this exhibition, the public is therefore guided through a series of thematic rooms such as “The Christian morality of money”, “The world of finance”, “The value of art: what did the artist Duchamp sell?” or even “The Exhibitionist Money”.

The exhibition brings together around two hundred works of art from various periods and horizons with loans from major public collections such as the Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art – Center Pompidou, but also many regional museums, o even galleries and private collectors. To complete this original show also a selection of films on the theme of money.

The exhibition is curated by Jean-Michel Bouhoursformer chief curator of the Center Pompidou and director of the New National Museum of Monaco (2003-2008), art historian, author of numerous books and texts on 20th-century art.

“The relationship between art and money cannot be reduced to considerations of value and exchange – explained the curator Jean-Michel Bouhours, – Capitalism has certainly transformed art into a commodity like any other; however, art also imposes itself as an ideal, irrational, fluctuating or even intangible value, because it touches the unquantifiable, the desire, the pleasure, the dream, which guides and exacerbates what Karl Marx called “the enigma of value” .